Monthly Archives: November 2006

You know, ordinarily I try to ignore old fart columnists who write a particularly cranky piece after seemingly falling out of bed or having gone without sex too long, but this article, entitled “The Earmarks of Athletics”, by SI.com’s Frank Deford is so relentlessly obnoxious that it’s provoked a response out of me.

Deford is ticked off that there isn’t any sense of immediate gratification in college football. Why, just imagine, we’re gonna have to wait until January to see Ohio State play again. This makes no sense to him. It’s “sheer lunacy”. To illustrate his point, Deford poses this irrelevant question, which of course he believes is anything but:

What would you think if, after the major league baseball league championships were played, the two winners practiced for a month or so and didn’t play the World Series until around Thanksgiving?

Uh, gee, Frank, I dunno. What would you think if a team that finished with the fourth best record in its conference won the BCS title game? Or if the players and the schools got into a pissing match and just canceled the whole damn postseason? Exactly what does professional baseball have to do with collegiate football in the first place? We’ll never know.

Moving on from there isn’t easy, but he’s game. Since any team that has to wait through this horror, this “purgatory”, before taking the field again will somehow be made different by the delay, it renders the entire outcome of the championship game meaningless. Only Deford doesn’t bother to tell us how Ohio State is changed. I guess we’ll just have to take his word.

Why this madness you ask? Frank is only too happy to explain:

But beyond that, the delayed schedule is inherently indefensible. It only derives from antiquity, because generations ago, bowl games in warm-weather cities were scheduled on New Year’s Day so that intrepid fans of the competing teams up north might have time enough to board choo-choo trains and make the long trek south in the week after Christmas.

Jeezus, I know Amtrak’s service sucks, but what kind of train has this guy been riding on? You could freakin’ run from Penn State to Miami in a month and a half!

Having exhausted this line of reasoning, not to mention his readers, Deford then makes the first oh-so-subtle shift in his attack. There are airplanes, don’t you know. And televisions. For God’s sake, we don’t have to wait until after Christmas to settle this! Except we do – because of those damned coaches who want to keep their kids in pads as long as they can and because of those damned schools that want to make money from the bowls (why they won’t make the same money playing before Christmas is one of those little mysteries Frank glosses over here, but give the man a break – he’s on a roll). The bastards!

And so he drops this little gem: “Bowl games are the earmarks of athletics.” No doubt he dazzled himself when he first thought that up. No doubt he doesn’t have a clue what it means, either. ‘Yo, Frank, earmarks are (1) expenditures that (2) elected officials (3) hide from the public (4) which is forced to pay for them with (5) taxes. Bowl games are (1) athletic events that (2) generate revenue (3) which, in turn, is willingly distributed to schools (4) openly that in turn use the funds to support athletic endeavors (5) and thus avoid sticking the taxpayers – at least for public institutions – with the expense.

These two concepts couldn’t have less in common if they were named Felix and Oscar. To call this a tortured analogy is an insult to torture.

But Fox TV, which telecasts the game, and all the other people who make money off college football, don’t want to see an Ohio State-Michigan final. Too regional, too Midwest. Bad for ratings. Instead, Southern California is glamorous and better positioned, demographically, you understand. So as rotten as the system always is, it will also be unfair this year. If Southern Cal beats UCLA this Saturday, which it always does, it will be voted into the championship game strictly on the basis of looks and money.

Now it’s evil Rupert Murdoch’s fault. Nobody will watch poor old Meesheegan, ’cause we all hate the Midwest. Never mind the fact that the first time Michigan and OSU played this year, they drew the highest in-season TV ratings for a college football game in thirteen years.

Assuming Deford gets paid for this kind of stuff, there ought to be some kind of shoddy earmark analogy for that. I’m just too numb to come up with it right now.

I do have an idea for the next hard hitting column from Deford: why the powers-that-be stretch out the Triple Crown too long. Look for it on your newsstands and computer screens as soon as he’s up to it…

First of all, let me say there’s already been a surreal element introduced into the SECCG, as evidenced by this quote from the Gainesville Sun:

So Meyer is an SEC Championship Game newbie. That’s why he turned to Mark Richt on Monday for some advice. Richt knows this game, half of the matchup for three of the last four years.

“Mark Richt is a friend of mine and we talked about it,” Meyer said. “I wanted to hear about it because Florida hasn’t been there in a long time. I wanted to know about crowd noise and the playing surface, sidelines, all the issues. The hotel, which is right next to the airport.

“I want to make sure we’re right on top of the game. We’re doing the research. We want to make sure we’re right on target. The thing we can’t have is distractions. I just want to make sure we do it right.”

No, it’s not that Meyer is referring to Richt as his friend – although the thought of those two text-messaging each other is a little… uh… let’s just not go there. Rather, it’s the idea that the Gator head coach has to call Athens to find out how to act in Atlanta for the SECCG. Weird. I wonder if Meyer returned the favor by giving Richt some tips on what to do in Jacksonville.

But I digress.

Arkansas is a great story this year. And McFadden is clearly the SEC player of the year. He’s a Herschel/Bo type physical freak. Don’t believe me? Go to YouTube, check out his 80 yard run against LSU and watch him slip into some gear unknown to most mortals to split the safeties downfield for a TD. It reminds me of Walker’s incredible TD run against S. Carolina in 1980 – the one where he just left the defensive back who had the angle to knock him out of bounds grasping air.

Arky is pretty impressive on offense in a lot of ways. The Hogs have the best offensive line in the conference; they’re big and experienced (four seniors and a junior, I think). Felix Jones ain’t exactly a slouch at running back, either. Marcus Monk is as good a wide receiver as there is in the SEC.

However, outside of Monk, the Razorback receiving corps is young and inexperienced. And the quarterback situation has been up and down all year for Arky. Casey Dick was horrible against LSU at year’s end. Robert Johnson was horrible against S. Cal. at the beginning of the year. Mustain, the boy wonder, did go 8-0 as a starter, but that was largely because he wasn’t allowed to do much more than hand the ball off. And even that wasn’t enough to avoid getting benched in favor of Dick when Arky struggled against the ‘Cocks (get your juvenile minds out of the gutter right now).

Arkansas has to have some semblance of a passing game going to have a chance Saturday night, or Florida’s defense will have a free hand to stop the run.

Which leads me to the other great player in this game – Reggie Nelson, who’s been the best defensive player in the SEC this year. He’s fast, fearless and a hard hitter who’ll definitely be playing on Sundays – hopefully, as soon as next year. If he gets to key on McFadden and Jones because Dick can’t make the passing game go, that will be big.

Florida is in the SECCG because of its defense. Great front seven (especially Siler and Everett at LB) that will be able to stand up to the Arky oline, even when the Hogs have the extra blocking in that “Wildcat” mutant Wing-T formation they run to devastating effect, and great safeties. The Gator corners are the weak spots on the defense, but if you have to have a weakness on defense against Arkansas, it might as well be there.

So the Florida defense against the Arkansas offense ought to be a lot of fun to watch. It’s the other matchup that gives me pause.

I really don’t like Urban Meyer’s offense. It’s gimmicky and all finesse. After two years, it’s yet to show that it can dominate a decent SEC defense (Florida won the East without scoring 30 points on any team in the conference). And it’s wasted the considerable talents of Chris Leak and DeShawn Wynn.

But I’m not really sold on Arky’s defense, either. Herring, the DC, runs a high-risk, high-pressure scheme that generates a lot of sacks, but also leaves the DBs in a lot of single coverages. And the Arkansas secondary isn’t that great, IMO. Against LSU, one of their corners put on a display of ineptitude that was only rivaled by what I saw from Cal’s DBs against Tennesee early in the year. Ugly.

In the end, it will come down to whether Arky can pressure Leak enough to throw him off his game. Auburn did, and came from behind to beat Florida without scoring an offensive TD. I just don’t have the confidence that the Hogs can do as well as Auburn did, though.

There are two potential downsides to the Gators’ chances in this game. First, Wynn, Harvin and Everett are all nicked up. Meyer expects Harvin to play. The other two are less certain. Everett being out would be signficant; the Gators just aren’t as good defensively when he’s not playing.

Second, the strangest thing about Florida is that the Gators may have the worst field goal kicker for an elite team in the history of D-1 football. Hetland is something like 3 of 12 at this point and Meyer is having weekly tryouts for the position, which is generally not a positive thing to be doing just before a championship game. Arky’s already beaten one team (Alabama) this year due to a collapse in the kicking game, so you never know if this winds up being something that bites UF in the ass.

Gun to my head time: the Hogs are fun to watch, no doubt. But I don’t think they’re good enough to pull it out without some turnover help. Unfortunately for them, it’s more likely the turnover flow goes the other way. Florida hasn’t been pretty this year, but they’ve only lost one game on a tough schedule and I think they do enough on defense to get it done.

The good thing is that the Gates don’t make it to the BCS title game – Southern Cal does – and we can listen to Meyer do his best Tommy Tubberville impression about how he’s being screwed by The Man. With any luck, all that whining will be a distraction going into the Sugar Bowl and Florida will get embarrassed by a lesser opponent.

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. What follows is my maiden voyage into the blogosphere, inspired by last Saturday’s epic Georgia-Georgia Tech game.

I’ve gone to almost every one of ‘em in the last 25 years (the last one I didn’t make was the 1999 Sanks non-fumble game). Despite the lesser stakes that came as a result of Georgia losing to Vandy and Kentucky in the same year, I have to say that, outside of the ’97 game, this was perhaps the most satisfying one that I’ve attended. So why would a game that really wouldn’t decide any more than whether the Dawgs would have a shot at going to the Chick-Fil-A Bowl bring me so much pleasure?

Because it hurt. Painfully. So much.

There are few things worse than deluding yourself into having hope and then watching as reality yanks all hope out from under you.

Going into the game, the Jackets had everything seemingly going their way. Tech had the All-American. The top-20 ranking by the pollsters. More wins. The pending conference championship game (or, as Jim Donnan refers to it, “The World’s Smallest Outdoor Cocktail Party”). The track record that a ranked Tech team had never lost to an unranked Georgia team.

And, of course, the fourth year senior starter at quarterback. As it turned out, that was the only thing that really mattered.

Reggie Ball, Reggie Ball. Another game with Georgia, another way to lose. If the annals of this series are ever updated in Clean Old Fashioned Hate, Reggie will surely rate a chapter of his own.

Was there any doubt when Georgia Tech got the ball back after the two point conversion as to what was getting ready to happen? Hell, during the time out, they were probably organizing a betting pool in the Dawg defensive huddle as to which player would come up with the turnover.

Ball’s post game “dog” quote was icing on the cake; it’s almost impossible to feel sorry for somebody who says things like that. Certainly many Jacket fans don’t, if the thread on the Tech Stingtalk board entitled “Did Reggie Ball throw the game on purpose” is any indication.

Really, if you had to pick a way for them to lose, blowing a fourth quarter lead – hey, Tenuta’s a defensive guru! – and then watching them have to put the ball back in Reggie’s hands to attempt a comeback was about as good as it gets.

My only regret from the game is that the replay of the Taylor TD showed that the officials made the right call. A blatant missed call there would have been the greatest “karma is a bitch” moment of all time.

Bottom line: Georgia’s weakest team of the Richt era was still able to take care of business against Georgia Tech’s best team during that time. Regardless of what Tech does against Wake Forest (!) in the ACCCG, this one’s left a nasty mark on the Tech psyche that ain’t going away for a while.

Quote Of The Day

“It's definitely different not knowing exactly who it's gonna be, but in a way, I feel like that's good,” he said. “One of my old coaches from Valdosta told me that competition is one of the best coaches. And I feel like, as well as each one of those three guys is performing, they're not gonna do anything but make each other better.” -- Jay Rome, The Red & Black, 3/25/15